The Best Time To Visit Brazil For Birding: A Region-by-Region, Month-by-Month Guide
"When is the best time to visit Brazil?" This is one of the questions we hear most. From birders who will be staying a couple days in the Atlantic Forest, from friends planning a first trip to the Pantanal and from people that want to visit Brazil for the first time. I have been answering it for years. I still pause before I reply. Not because I don’t know the seasons. I know them well, and this article describes them, region by region and month by month, with the same planning table we use in our own office. I pause because of something I have learned in the field, and it is the part of the answer people do not expect.
I have traveled to a region in exactly the month our own table calls prime and come home without the one bird I had gone there for. And I have birded in months no table would recommend, in rain, in heat, in forest everyone told me would be silent, and had some of the best days of my birding life. Every guide on our team has stories like that. Anyone who has birded long enough in Brazil does.
So here is the honest answer, the one I give before any table: the best time to visit Brazil is the time you can. I would never skip the Northeast because my only free weeks fell in March or April. Perhaps the Araripe Manakin (Antilophia bokermanni) would be in moult, with a few feathers still growing in. But you would still see it. You will still see the endemics, the important birds, the ones people cross an ocean for. The word "best" implies there is a “worst", and in a country this size, with this many biomes, the worst time somewhere is usually the best time somewhere else.
What follows is the long answer. It explains why the question is harder in Brazil than almost anywhere, what our planning table measures and what it deliberately leaves out, and then walks through each region: what the rains do, when the birds sing, which spectacle is worth building a whole trip around, and where the trade-offs lie. If you only want the quick answer, jump to the table and to the month-by-month guide near the end. If you want to understand it, read on.
A Country With Ten Calendars
Brazil runs from about five degrees north of the equator, in Roraima, to nearly thirty-four degrees south, on the border with Uruguay. Between those two points it holds equatorial rainforest, tropical savanna, seasonally dry forest (Caatinga), the largest tropical wetland on the planet, subtropical Atlantic Forest, temperate grasslands and lots of habitats in between. When Alvares and colleagues mapped the country's climates in 2013, they needed a dozen Köppen climate types to describe it. No single "season" covers all of that, which is why the question has no single answer.
The first thing to fix in mind is that our seasons are the reverse of Europe's and North America's. The austral summer runs from December to February, the austral winter from June to August. When a birder in Ohio or Norfolk is looking at snow in January, the Southeast of Brazil is warm, green and loud with song; when that same birder is enjoying long July evenings, the Pantanal is starting to dry up and the Amazon is at its most walkable.
The second is that rainfall, not temperature, is the lever that matters in most of Brazil, and the rains do not arrive everywhere at once. Most of the country, from the Cerrado through the Pantanal to the Southeast, swings between a wet summer, roughly October or November to March or April, and a dry winter, roughly May to September. The central Amazon is wettest from December to May and driest from July to October. The interior of the Northeast, the Caatinga, waits for rains that fall mostly between January and April, and in some years barely fall at all. The coast of the Northeast, from Bahia up to Pernambuco, runs on the opposite calendar to the rest of the Atlantic Forest: its heaviest rains fall in the autumn and winter, from about April to July, and its driest months are spring and early summer. And Roraima, north of the equator, has its rains from May to August and its dry season from October to March, flipped relative to everything else in the Amazon.
The third lever is the birds themselves. Across most of Brazil, breeding and song peak in the austral spring and early summer, when the first rains bring insects and fruit. In a long-term study of passerines in south-central Brazil, Marini and Durães found brood patches from August onward, most common between October and January with a peak in November, and moult concentrated later in the rainy season, from December to April. Near Manaus, in the central Amazon, Stouffer, Johnson and Bierregaard followed more than 31,000 captures over seventeen years and found something different again: birds breeding in every month of the year, with the peak of incubation patches from October to December, at the end of the dry season, and the low point from April to June, in the late wet season. Put the water and the birds together, region by region, and you get ten different calendars. That is what our table tries to capture.
What Our Table Measures, and What It Leaves Out
The planner below has been debated more than any other image we have made. Our guides argue over it, cell by cell, and not all of them agree. Some birders who know Brazil well will disagree with parts of it too, and that’s ok, as long as it is clear on what it measures. Behind the planner sits BBE’s own field records built up over the years: 6,486 checklists submitted between 2015 and 2026, covering 1,840 species over 542 days in the field, across 4,269 localities in 483 municipalities.
It is not a map of vocal activity. If it were, the Amazon rows would look different, and several regions would be prime in their wettest months. It is a blend of four things: how vocal and active the birds are, how easy they are to actually see, how accessible the birding areas are (trails, river beaches, dirt roads, canopy towers), and how confident we can be that a week of your trip will not be washed out by rain that refuses to stop. For the Amazon, that means we look for the start of the dry season or the start of the rains, when activity is high and the forest is still passable, and we try to make those windows work. A birder who wants ant-following birds above everything else would do better in the rainy season, when army-ant swarms are most active, but the same rain can take a week out of a trip, and we would rather say that up front.
The table grades regions for a general birding trip, the kind where the aim is a long and varied list, the endemics, and a good time in the field. It does not grade single targets, and it does not grade spectacles. When a target has a season of its own, such as the parrot gathering in the South (Red-Spectacled Parrot), I say so in the regional sections, and in those cases you should follow the target, not the grid.
The four grades mean what they say. Prime is the window we would choose ourselves. Very good means we run tours in that month without hesitation. Good means the birding is still rewarding, with a trade-off you should know about. Fair means we can do it, some of our best days have happened in those months, but the odds of lost days or harder access are real, and if you can choose, we would rather send you somewhere else in Brazil in that month.
For readers who prefer words to colors, this is the same planner written out. The months are grouped by grade, and every region has at least one very good or prime window.
Region | Prime | Very good | Good | Fair |
Northeast | Oct to Jan | Feb to Mar; Aug to Sep | Jun to Jul | Apr to May |
Southeast | Aug to Jan | Apr to Jul | Feb to Mar | none |
South | Sep to Jan | Jun to Aug | Feb to May | none |
Pantanal | Jun to Sep | Oct | Apr to May; Nov | Dec to Mar |
Central Brazil | Jul to Nov | May to Jun; Dec | Jan to Apr | none |
Pará | May to Jul | Apr; Aug to Sep | Oct to Nov | Dec to Mar |
Manaus | Jul to Sep | Jun; Oct | May; Nov | Dec to Apr |
Roraima | Oct to Feb | Mar; Sep | Aug | Apr to Jul |
Rondônia | Jun to Aug | Apr to May; Nov | Sep to Oct | Dec to Mar |
Acre | Jul to Sep | Jun; Oct | May; Nov | Dec to Apr |
The Amazon: Follow the Water
The Brazilian Amazon is governed by water. Every river in the basin rises and falls once a year, and that pulse decides where you can walk, where you can float, and what you will see. At Manaus, the Rio Negro typically climbs about ten metres between its lowest point, in October or November, and its peak, in June or early July; over more than a century of measurements at the port, the long-term average runs from roughly 17.6 metres at low water to 27.8 metres at high water. In June 2021 the river set a record of about 30 metres, the highest since records began in 1902. In October 2024 it fell to 12.11 metres, the lowest ever measured, and boats were left sitting on dry riverbeds. Those extremes are new, and they also matter for planning. I’ll come back to them below.
For the birder, the pulse translates simply. In the drier months the water recedes, river beaches and sandbars emerge, the trails through terra firme (the unflooded upland forest, where most Amazonian species live) firm up, and mornings on a canopy tower, such as the ZF-2 and MUSA towers near Manaus, are dependable. In the high-water months the some forests are reached by boat: the igapó, the blackwater flooded forest of the Rio Negro and the Anavilhanas archipelago, and the várzea, the whitewater flooded forest of the Amazon and the Solimões, open up to species you cannot reach on foot. So, the choice in the Amazon is rarely about birds being absent. It is about access, and about how much rain you are willing to absorb.
That is why the five Amazonian rows in our table do not simply copy one another. Manaus is prime from July to September, the heart of the drier season on the Rio Negro, with June and October very good. Pará is prime earlier, from May to July, at the end of the rains (Belém's wettest months run from January to May), when the forest is still lush, the birds are still active and the trails are already drying, which is when the five interfluves of the state work best; April and August to September are very good there. Rondônia, in the southwestern Amazon, where the rains fall from about November to April, is prime from June to August, with April to May and November very good. Acre, further west, is prime from July to September, with June and October very good. In all four, the December to March core of the rainy season is graded fair, not because the forest is empty but because trails, dirt roads, boats and small planes all become less reliable and a week can disappear under rain.
Roraima is the exception, and it deserves its own paragraph. Boa Vista sits north of the equator, and its climate belongs to the northern hemisphere's calendar: the rains come from May to August, with June the wettest month, and the dry season runs from October to March. That long dry season is why the northeast of the state is lavrado, the open savanna of the Rio Branco, rather than closed forest. So, Roraima's prime window, October to February, falls exactly when the rest of the Amazon is at its wettest, which makes it the natural Amazon choice for a December or January trip. We work its white-sand forests and the endemics of the Rio Branco in the dry, when the rivers drop and the savanna tracks open.
Two more Amazonian facts you should at least be aware of. The first is the “friagem”, a mass of cold air from the far south (or from the Andes in the case of Acre sometimes) that reaches the Amazon a few times a year, most often between July and September. It drops the temperature by several degrees for a few days (seven degrees was recorded at Porto Velho during one well-studied event), brings cloud and a wind from the south, and quietens the forest until it passes. It is more a curiosity than a problem, and on a long walk a cool day can be a gift: on our Rondônia and Acre trip in June 2025, a day when the temperature never went above 24 degrees made a long forest walk perfectly manageable, where the usual Amazon heat would have made it a very different story. The second is smoke. The late dry season, from August to October, is the burning season across most of the Amazon, and in bad years a haze hangs over for weeks. That is part of why Rondônia's grade eases from prime to good in September and October and climbs again in November, when the first rains clear the air and wake the forest.
Our fixed-date Amazon departures consider all of the issues mentioned above.
For the biogeography behind the regions, read How Many Amazons Are There in the Brazilian Amazon? and Five Amazons in One State; for what a June trip to the western Amazon actually looks like, day by day, there is our Rondônia and Acre trip report.
The Northeast: Two Clocks in One Region
The Northeast runs on two clocks, and the best time depends on which one you are chasing. In the interior, the Caatinga, the seasonally dry forest found only in Brazil, waits for rains that fall mostly from January to April; on the Chapada do Araripe, the only home of the Araripe Manakin, the rainy season runs from January to April with a peak around March. On the coast, the Atlantic Forest of the Northeast, from Bahia north to Pernambuco and including the fragments of the Pernambuco Centre of Endemism north of the São Francisco river, keeps the opposite calendar to the rest of the Atlantic Forest: Recife's rains run from March to August and peak in June and July at close to 400 millimetres each, and its driest months are October to December.
Our table grades the Northeast prime from October to January, very good in February and March and again in August and September, good in June and July, and fair in April and May. The logic is that spring and early summer are dry on the coast, which is when the threatened forest fragments of Pernambuco and Alagoas are at their most workable and their restricted-range birds, the Seven-colored Tanager (Tangara fastuosa) among them, are active. Inland, the same months are the height of the Caatinga dry season, and this is the counter-intuitive part: a leafless Caatinga is a transparent one. The vegetation is mostly bare, the birds are far easier to see, and a good share of the Caatinga's residents are breeding or vocal. On the Araripe plateau, Girão and Souto showed that the manakin's vocal activity climbs from August, peaks in September and October, before the rains, and fades by February as they build. Lear's Macaw (Anodorhynchus leari) is present at the Canudos canyons in Bahia, and findable, in every month of the year.
Then the rains reach the sertão, the dry interior, usually in January or February, and the Caatinga does something that has to be seen once: it turns green almost overnight. Insects emerge, the residents breed in a short, intense burst, and the landscape is at its most photogenic. That is what keeps February and March very good here. April and May are fair, and the reason is water rather than birds: those are among the wettest months in Ceará and the interior, and on the coast the autumn rains are building towards their winter peak, so the odds of losing field days rise. By June and July the interior is drying again while the coast is at its wettest, which holds those months at good. From August the coast begins to dry and the grade climbs back towards prime.
In practice, most of our Northeast tours thread both biomes, coast and interior, and we run them between July and February. All of them work, each in its own way, and every one of them has delivered the endemics that exist only in this corner of Brazil. If you can only come in March or April, come. You may find the manakin a little scruffy in moult, but the odds will still be very much on your side.
For more on the region's birds, read A Bird That Changed Lives: The Araripe Manakin, our piece on the White-browed Guan and the Caatinga, and Chapada Diamantina Beyond the Birds.
The Southeast: When the Bellbird Sings
The Atlantic Forest of the Southeast, across the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais, keeps the classic calendar: wet, warm summers from October to March, with December to February the wettest and stormiest months, and a dry, cool winter from roughly May to September. We consider prime from August to January, very good from April to July, and good in February and March. Nothing here is fair, and that is deliberate. If the aim is a large and varied list rather than a single target, any month in the Atlantic Forest is a good month, and each has its own rewards.
The case for spring and early summer is the sound. From August or September to February or March the cotingas are calling: the Bare-throated Bellbird (Procnias nudicollis), whose breeding season runs from September to February, hammers its call from the highest branches, and the Grey-winged Cotinga (Lipaugus conditus) and Black-and-gold Cotinga (Lipaugus ater) sing out of the mist of the Serra dos Órgãos. This is a forest birded largely by ear, and when the skulkers are on territory, the antbirds, the tapaculos, the bristlefront, they announce themselves and become easier to find. Mixed flocks are active, and we work the Cherry-throated Tanager (Nemosia rourei), the Red-billed Curassow (Crax blumenbachii) and the Itatiaia Spinetail (Asthenes moreirae) in the same season. The price is the weather: humid afternoons and rain that can shorten the productive part of the day, and in February and March, at the end of the wet season, enough of it to bring the grade down to good while the song is already fading.
The case for the dry season is different and, for many birders, underrated. From April to July the mornings are crisp, the light is clean, the montane air at Itatiaia can be cold enough for frost, and the forest is noticeably quieter: the birds are there, but with less song the hardest species take longer to pin down. Two things compensate. The first is the feeders. Winter is the peak of the feeder season in the Southeast, when the hummingbird and fruit feeders of the southeast run at full capacity, with Brazilian Rubies (Heliodoxa rubricauda), Black Jacobins (Florisuga fusca), Violet-capped Woodnymphs (Thalurania glaucopis) and many more at arm's length. Many lodges are at their busiest in exactly these months, and photographers are the reason. The second is comfort: cool, dry days make long field days easy, and the roads and trails are at their best. For a birder who values comfort and pictures over chasing the toughest skulkers, a winter trip to the Southeast is a very good trip, and the table says so.
For the stories behind the region's rarest birds, read What's the Deal With the Cherry-throated Tanager?, The Mystery of the Rio de Janeiro Antwren and our profile of Macuquinho Lodge and Sítio Cotinga.
The South: A Cold Country With Two Seasons of Its Own
Everywhere else in this article I have asked you to watch the rain. In the South, across Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, watch the thermometer as well. This is the one region of Brazil with a real winter. From June to August frost is routine on the highland plateaus, and Urupema, in the Santa Catarina highlands at around 1,400 meters, holds the title of National Capital of Cold by federal law. Our table grades the South prime from September to January, very good from June to August, and good from February to May, and for a general list those grades are fair. But this is the region where I most want you to read past the grid, because for a birder, winter and summer in the South are two different countries. A good part of what makes the region special does not live here all year. It arrives, and it arrives on two different calendars.
Summer belongs to the birds that come down from the north. From October onward the highland grasslands and the Pampas fill with breeders that spend the rest of the year in the Cerrado and beyond: the Tropeiro Seedeater (Sporophila beltoni), the Black-bellied Seedeater (Sporophila melanogaster) and the Marsh Seedeater (Sporophila palustris) arrive to nest. Although not migratory, the Glaucous-blue Grosbeak (Cyanoloxia glaucocaerulea), is much easier to find in this time of year. Tracking work published in 2025 on the Tropeiro Seedeater gave the first precise picture of that window: two tagged males left their breeding grounds in southern Brazil in early March, wintered at several sites in the Cerrado, and started back south in October and early November. In the forests the Rufous-tailed Attila (Attila phoenicurus) is back on territory and singing, and the Blue-tufted Starthroat (Heliomaster furcifer) is at its flowers. The wet grasslands of the Pampas are where we go for two birds that few visitors ever see, the South American Painted-snipe (Nycticryphes semicollaris) and Hudson's Canastero (Asthenes hudsoni), and neither is a bird you find by accident. On the coast, Lagoa do Peixe National Park, a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site since 1990, fills with sandpipers and other shorebirds down from the Arctic in the same months. Put it together and November to February is the summer window; by March the seedeaters are leaving. This is the calendar our South Brazil Popular tours follow, and it is why they run in the austral summer.
Winter belongs to the birds that come up from the south. When the cold settles over the Pampas, species that breed in Patagonia and along the Andes move north, and Rio Grande do Sul is the far end of their journey. The Buff-winged Cinclodes (Cinclodes fuscus) works the short grass and the lagoon edges, the Austral Negrito (Lessonia rufa) and the Black-crowned Monjita (Neoxolmis coronatus) sit on fence posts in open country, and the White-tipped Plantcutter (Phytotoma rutila) turns up in the scrub. On the beaches the Rufous-chested Dotterel (Zonibyx modestus) runs the tide line, and Olrog's Gull (Larus atlanticus), which breeds on the coast of Argentina and is on none of our lists in summer, spends the cold months on ours. Offshore, this is when the Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross (Thalassarche chlororhynchos) comes closest to the Brazilian coast. The forests add the Yellow-legged Tinamou (Crypturellus noctivagus) occasionally visiting known hides. Most of the birds mentioned above aren’t in the South in January. Miss the winter and you miss them.
And then there is the parrot. From mid-March the Red-spectacled Parrots (Amazona pretrei) begin to gather in the Araucaria forests of the Santa Catarina highlands, drawn by the pinhão, the large, nutritious seed of the Brazilian pine (Araucaria angustifolia). The numbers grow through April and peak as the first cold arrives, in May, when nearly the entire world population, counted at more than twenty thousand birds in the 2021 census, is in the region, and on the best evenings you can count thousands on a single flight over Urupema. We have written a whole article about it, and I will not repeat it here. The point for planning is that the “revoada”, the mass flight, and the Patagonian visitors share the same calendar, and that is exactly the reason our South Brazil Winter Tour, which we are about to relaunch, exists: one trip, in the cold, for the birds that only the cold brings. And you can usually connect a trip in this time of year with any amazonian tour we offer in the same timeframe.
So, the honest summary of the South is this: the grid says spring and summer, and for a long list that is right. But winter, graded only very good, is the season with the birds you cannot get any other way, and the two seasons do not overlap. Choose the one whose birds you want, or come twice.
Read the full story of the gathering in The Red-spectacled Parrot Festival in Southern Brazil.
The Pantanal: The Clearest Case for the Dry Season
The Pantanal is the clearest case in Brazil of the dry season being the prime season, and the geography explains why. This is the largest tropical wetland on Earth, some 150,000 square kilometres on the Brazilian side alone, across Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, on a plain so flat that the water takes months to drain. The rains fall from about November to March and are heaviest from December to February; the northern Pantanal floods soon after the rains begin, while the central and southern portions flood later, as the pulse works its way down the Paraguay River and backs up its tributaries. The dry season runs from June to August at its core, and it is in those months, and on into September, that the receding water funnels fish, caimans, capybaras and birds into ever smaller pools. The great waterbird congregations that made the Pantanal famous, the Jabiru (Jabiru mycteria), the Wood Storks (Mycteria americana), the herons and the Roseate Spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) packed together, are a dry-season sight. So is the Jaguar (Panthera onca): along the rivers of Porto Jofre, in the northern Pantanal, exposed banks and easy boat access make the dry season the most reliable time we know to watch a wild jaguar. Our table has the Pantanal prime from June to September, very good in October, good in April, May and November, and fair from December to March.
The trade-offs are real. September and October are hot, with afternoons often above 35 degrees, and October brings the first storms; the wildlife is still concentrated, which keeps October very good. The late dry season is also the burning season, and in bad years, 2020 above all, fire and smoke have reached deep into the Pantanal. April and May are the tail of the flood, with water still high in places, the Transpantaneira drying out and the birds beginning to concentrate. November is the first month of the rains, when breeding begins and the plain starts to green. From December to March the Pantanal is a different place: the tracks turn to mud, side roads close, the grass stands tall and the water spreads for kilometres. It is also the lush breeding season, when many species are displaying and nesting and the landscape is at its most spectacular to look at. For a birder chasing breeding behaviour and willing to work to move around, it has real rewards; for a first visit, or for jaguars, come in the dry season.
The Hyacinth Macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), for what it is worth, does not care what month it is.
Our complete guide to the region is The Brazilian Pantanal: Wildlife, Jaguars, Birding and a Complete Travel Guide.
Central Brazil: The Cerrado Between Fire and Rain
Central Brazil is the Cerrado, the great tropical savanna of the Brazilian plateau, and it keeps the same dry-winter, wet-summer clock as the Pantanal with a different set of consequences. In Brasília the rains run from October to April and are heaviest from November to January; from May to August the plateau is very dry, with less than thirty millimetres in a month, the skies are clear and the grass turns to straw. Our table grades the region prime from July to November, very good in May, June and December, and good from January to April.
The dry season earns its grade through access and visibility. The tracks into Chapada dos Veadeiros, the Terra Ronca karst, the Araguaia and Emas National Park are at their best, the grass is low, and open-country birds are easy to find in a landscape that hides nothing. The end of the dry season, August and September, is also the fire season, when fires sweep the grasslands; smoke can be part of the picture, and burnt ground brings its own birds out into the open. Then the rains break, usually in October, and between October and December the termite mounds of Emas National Park light up at night with the bioluminescent larvae that made the park famous. Our fixed-date Central Brazil tour is placed in October for exactly this hinge between dry and wet.
From January to April the rains are in full swing, the grass is tall and the rivers up, and the grade drops to good; the landscape is green and the birds are still breeding, but the wide views and easy walking of the dry season are gone.
For the full picture of the region, read Central Brazil: Into the Heart of the Cerrado.
Best Time by What You Are Looking For
The table answers one question: where the birding is generally best in a given month. The birders who write to us are usually carrying a second question underneath it, about what they want the trip to be, and the calendar shifts with the answer.
Take the birder on a first visit who wants the longest possible list. For that trip, let the calendar choose the region. In July and August, six of our ten regions are prime at once, with the Pantanal, Central Brazil and most of the Amazon at their peak and the Southeast prime from August. In October and November, five are prime: the Northeast, the Southeast, the South, Central Brazil and Roraima. Pair a region at its prime with a neighbor that is very good and you have a three-week trip in almost any month. There is no month of the year in which Brazil has nowhere prime or very good to bird; the softest months nationally are March and April, when nothing is prime, but the Northeast and Roraima are very good in March, and the Southeast, Pará and Rondônia are very good in April.
The birder travelling for one target or one spectacle should follow the target, not the grid. The Red-spectacled Parrots gather in late April and May. The southern seedeaters and the grassland breeders are on their territories from November to February. Jaguars are most reliable in the Pantanal dry season, June to October. The Emas termite mounds glow between October and December. The Araripe Manakin sings most from September to October, though it can be found all year.
Photographers should think in dry seasons and feeders. The Southeast from April to July is the peak of the feeder season, with clean light and the lodges at full activity. The Pantanal from June to September concentrates birds and mammals on open riverbanks in good light. The hummingbird garden our Endangered Northeast Extension visits in the dry coastal months can hold up to twenty species at arm's length, and the Red-and-green Macaws (Ara chloropterus) of the Buraco das Araras, the sinkhole near Jardim in Mato Grosso do Sul where they wheel against red rock, are there in every month. For landscapes, the green Caatinga of February and March is a picture few visitors ever see.
When mammals matter as much as birds, the Pantanal dry season is the time for Jaguar, Giant Otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), Giant Anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) and Brazilian Tapir (Tapirus terrestris). The Maned Wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) comes to the steps of the Caraça sanctuary in Minas Gerais throughout the year, and the primates of the Northeast, the Blond Titi (Callicebus barbarabrownae) among them, are a trip of their own.
Comfort decides more trips than people admit, and it is a fair criterion. The coolest, driest birding in Brazil is the Southeast and the South in the austral winter and spring, and the Northeast between August and November, which is warm, at 28 to 34 degrees, but dry. The Pantanal in September and October, Central Brazil in the late dry season and the Amazon in its dry months all run above 35 degrees on many afternoons, and a midday break is part of every one of our itineraries for that reason.
Then there is the birder whose dates are fixed by someone else's holidays, and here the news is better than you might expect. Over Christmas and New Year, the Northeast, the Southeast, the South and Roraima are all prime. In the northern summer holidays of July and August, the Pantanal, Central Brazil, Manaus, Rondônia and Acre are prime, Pará is prime in July and very good in August, and the Southeast is very good in July and prime in August. Around Easter, in April, the Southeast, Pará and Rondônia are very good. Whatever the month, there is a region whose clock fits it.
Where to Go in Brazil, Month by Month
This is the same planner turned on its side, listing for each month the regions our table grades prime or very good. Everything not listed is good or fair for that month; the regional sections above explain why.
Month | Prime | Very good |
January | Northeast, Southeast, South, Roraima | none |
February | Roraima | Northeast |
March | none | Northeast, Roraima |
April | none | Southeast, Pará, Rondônia |
May | Pará | Southeast, Central Brazil, Rondônia |
June | Pantanal, Pará, Rondônia | Southeast, South, Central Brazil, Manaus, Acre |
July | Pantanal, Central Brazil, Pará, Manaus, Rondônia, Acre | Southeast, South |
August | Southeast, Pantanal, Central Brazil, Manaus, Rondônia, Acre | Northeast, South, Pará |
September | Southeast, South, Pantanal, Central Brazil, Manaus, Acre | Northeast, Pará, Roraima |
October | Northeast, Southeast, South, Central Brazil, Roraima | Pantanal, Manaus, Acre |
November | Northeast, Southeast, South, Central Brazil, Roraima | Rondônia |
December | Northeast, Southeast, South, Roraima | Central Brazil |
Rain, Heat, Smoke and Cold: What Can Go Wrong
Rain is the big one. In the Pantanal in January, in Manaus in April or on the Pernambuco coast in June, a storm can take an afternoon and a stalled front can take three days. Our itineraries are built with margin for that, and a rainy day is rarely an empty day: the hour after rain is often the most active of the whole day, and in the Amazon the wet months are when the army ants swarm and the antbirds follow them. But a week of rain is a week of rain, and that is why the fair grades exist.
Heat is the second. The Pantanal in September and October, the Cerrado at the end of the dry season and the Amazon in its dry months can run above 35 degrees by early afternoon. It is why we bird early, break at midday and go out again late, and why the walking distances on our Amazonian tours are written with the heat in mind.
Smoke is the third, and a more recent worry. From August to October, fires burn across the Cerrado, the Amazon and the Pantanal. Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, INPE, tracks them daily, and so do we. Most years the haze is a nuisance for photographers rather than a problem for birders. In the worst years it is more than that, and we would rather move a route than pretend the sky is clear.
Cold is the fourth, and mostly a pleasure. The southern highlands freeze on winter nights, Itatiaia can wake up white with frost, and a “friagem” can put a jacket on you in Rondônia in July. Pack accordingly.
The last caveat is the one nobody could have written about a decade ago. The Amazon set a record flood in 2021 and record droughts in 2023 and 2024, when rivers fell so far that boats sat on sand in October and November. The Pantanal burned as never before in 2020. The seasons in this article are the long-term pattern, and they still hold, but the extremes at either end have grown. We watch the river gauges and the fire maps as a matter of routine, and when a season goes wrong, we adjust the route rather than the story we tell you.
The Time You Can
I started with a confession, and I want to end with the rule it taught me. The table in this article is the best planning tool we know how to make, and we made it with care: it carries years of field experience from guides who live in these regions and argued about every cell. Use it. But it is a compass, not a verdict. Brazil in the "wrong" month is still Brazil: the endemics are still endemic, the manakin is still on its plateau, the macaws still come to the canyon at dawn. What changes are the odds of a handful of birds and the shape of a handful of days.
So, if the month you have is March, or April, or a rainy December, do not put the trip off for a better year that may never come. Pick the region whose clock fits your month, come prepared to miss something, and come anyway. The birds I think about are rarely the ones I missed in the wrong season. They are the ones from the trips that never happened.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best month to go birding in Brazil?
There is no single best month, because Brazil's regions run on different calendars. For the widest choice, July and August put six of our ten regions at their prime at once (the Pantanal, Central Brazil and most of the Amazon, with the Southeast joining in August), and October and November put five at their prime (the Northeast, the Southeast, the South, Central Brazil and Roraima). If your dates are fixed, choose the region whose prime window fits them: every month of the year has at least one region graded prime or very good in our planner.
When is the rainy season in Brazil?
It depends where you are. Most of central, southeastern and western Brazil, including the Cerrado, the Pantanal and the Atlantic Forest of the Southeast, has a wet summer from about October or November to March or April and a dry winter from May to September. The central Amazon is wettest from December to May and driest from July to October. The Caatinga of the Northeast interior gets its rains mainly from January to April, while the Northeast coast, from Bahia to Pernambuco, is wettest from about April to July. And Roraima, north of the equator, is wet from May to August and dry from October to March.
Is the wet season worth it for birding in Brazil?
Often, yes, with trade-offs. The Caatinga turns green and breeds with the January to April rains, the Amazon's high water opens the igapó and várzea flooded forests to boat birding, and the Pantanal floods into a lush breeding landscape. The costs are muddy roads, swollen rivers, lost afternoons and heat. Our planner grades the wettest months fair in the Amazon and the Pantanal for exactly that reason, while the Southeast, the South and Central Brazil never fall below good in any month mainly because besides the rains, the birding spots are still accessible.
When is the best time to visit the Pantanal for jaguars and birds?
The dry season, June to September at its best and very good into October. As the floodwater recedes, birds and wildlife concentrate around shrinking pools, and along the rivers of Porto Jofre exposed banks and easy boat access make jaguar sightings as reliable as they get anywhere. September and October are very hot, often above 35 degrees, and the late dry season can bring fire and smoke in bad years. From December to March the plain floods and access becomes hard, although the breeding season is spectacular for those willing to work for it.
What is the best time for Amazon birding?
The drier months, when trails firm up, river beaches emerge and canopy towers are most dependable, but the exact window shifts across the basin. In our planner Manaus is prime from July to September, Pará from May to July, Rondônia from June to August and Acre from July to September. Roraima, north of the equator, is reversed and prime from October to February. The rainy months, roughly December to May in most of the region, and the high water that follows them are still excellent if your priority is flooded-forest birding by boat.
Why is Roraima different from the rest of the Amazon?
Because it lies north of the equator, so its rains fall from May to August and its dry season runs from October to March, the opposite of Manaus, Pará, Rondônia and Acre. It makes Roraima the natural Amazon choice for a December or January trip, when the rest of the basin is at its wettest.
When is the best time to visit Northeast Brazil for the Araripe Manakin and Lear's Macaw?
Both birds can be seen in any month, and we run Northeast tours between July and February. The planner grades the region prime from October to January, when the coast is dry and the leafless Caatinga makes its birds easy to see, very good in February and March, when the interior greens with the rains, and again in August and September, and fair only in April and May, when the interior is at its wettest and the coastal rains are building. The Araripe Manakin's vocal activity peaks in September and October but are around all year; Lear's Macaw is at the Canudos canyons all year.
When do Atlantic Forest birds sing the most?
In the austral spring and summer, roughly September to February, their peak breeding season. The Bare-throated Bellbird's breeding season runs from September to February, and this is when the cotingas of the Southeast, the antbirds and the tapaculos are on territory and easiest to detect by ear. The trade-off is warmer, wetter weather. The dry winter, April to July, is quieter but cooler, with the feeders at their peak, which is why our planner still grades it very good.
When can I see the Red-spectacled Parrot gathering at Urupema?
In the autumn. The parrots start to arrive in the Araucaria forests of the Santa Catarina highlands from mid-March, numbers build through April and peak in May, and the birds disperse as the pinhão seed crop runs out, in early June. Late April and May are the months to plan around. This is a single-target season that our general planner does not show, because for general birding the South is at its best from September to January.
When is the best time for bird photography in Brazil?
Dry seasons and feeders. The Southeast from April to July is the peak of the feeder season, with hummingbird and fruit feeders at full activity and clean winter light. The Pantanal from June to September concentrates birds and mammals on open riverbanks. The dry coastal months of the Northeast are the time for the hummingbird garden on our Endangered Northeast Extension, and the Red-and-green Macaws of the Buraco das Araras, near Jardim in Mato Grosso do Sul, are there in every month.
Can I go birding in Brazil in December and January?
Yes, and it is one of the better times for four of our regions. Over the northern winter holidays the Northeast, the Southeast, the South and Roraima are all graded prime. The Pantanal and the rest of the Amazon are in their wet season and graded fair, so if the Amazon is a must in those months, Roraima is the answer.
How does Brazil Birding Experts choose its set departure dates?
We place each fixed-date tour inside the prime window of its region on our planner, balancing bird activity, visibility, access and the risk of lost days to rain. That is why our Amazon departures sit in the drier months, our Pantanal departures in the dry season, our Central Brazil tour in October, our Southeast tours in the spring song season, and our southern grassland tours in the austral summer. Private and tailored itineraries can be timed to a single target or spectacle instead, and we are glad to talk through what your dates allow.
References
Alvares, C.A., Stape, J.L., Sentelhas, P.C., Gonçalves, J.L. de M. & Sparovek, G. (2013). Köppen's climate classification map for Brazil. Meteorologische Zeitschrift 22(6): 711 to 728. https://doi.org/10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0507
Girão, W. & Souto, A. (2005). Breeding period of Araripe Manakin Antilophia bokermanni inferred from vocalisation activity. Cotinga 24: 35 to 37.
Ikeda-Castrillon, S.K., Oliveira-Junior, E.S., Rossetto, O.C., Saito, C.H. & Wantzen, K.M. (2022). The Pantanal: a seasonal Neotropical wetland under threat. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_36-1
Junk, W.J., da Cunha, C.N., Wantzen, K.M., Petermann, P., Strüssmann, C., Marques, M.I. & Adis, J. (2006). Biodiversity and its conservation in the Pantanal of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Aquatic Sciences 68(3): 278 to 309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-006-0851-4
Marini, M.Â. & Durães, R. (2001). Annual patterns of molt and reproductive activity of passerines in south-central Brazil. The Condor 103(4): 767 to 775. https://doi.org/10.1093/condor/103.4.767
Repenning, M., Jahn, A.E., Hallworth, M.T. & Fontana, C.S. (2025). Tracking tiny migrants: first description of the annual cycle of Sporophila seedeaters. Ornithology Research 33: 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43388-024-00219-8
Stouffer, P.C., Johnson, E.I. & Bierregaard, R.O. Jr. (2013). Breeding seasonality in central Amazonian rainforest birds. The Auk 130(3): 529 to 540. https://doi.org/10.1525/auk.2013.12179
Online resources: eBird (ebird.org) for month-by-month bar charts of any Brazilian hotspot; INMET, the Brazilian National Institute of Meteorology, for climate normals by station; the Geological Survey of Brazil (SGB) hydrological alert system for river levels at Manaus and in the Pantanal; INPE's Queimadas programme for daily fire monitoring; the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) on friagem events; and the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network page for Lagoa do Peixe.
For private and customized itineraries timed to the region, the season and the birds you most want to see, get in touch via our contact page.
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